Hollywood takes its annual pre-Oscar holiday in Berlin. As the
airborne charabancs carrying MerylStreep, George Clooney, Robert Altman, Heath Ledger,
Philip Seymour Hoffman and the rest dip towards Tegel
Airport and swish to a halt on the snow-edged landing strip, armies of mad
Germans waving autograph books rush the planes. “Bitte,
deinunterschrift!
(Please, your signature!)” they cry, forcing pencils into stupefied hands as
the stellar ones descend the airplane steps. Then the German fans dance
around the tarmac singing. “ Ichliebe Hollywood, ichliebe die darstellerin, ichliebe die regisseurin! (I love Hollywood, I love the stars, I love
the directors!)” Then fireworks go off in a dazzling display overhead. Then
Berlin Film Festival chief Dieter Kosslick, borne
aloft in chariot of fire, skims over the terminal buildings to consummate the
final welcome.

Okay, it isn’t quite like that. The plane I was on, carrying Bob
Altman and Woody Harrelson, unloaded its passengers without a single incident
of frenzy. Maybe people were too astonished – if they recognized the duo at
all – at seeing a frail octogenarian descend into an airport wheelchair
(Altman), accompanied by a bearded fellow in a ski cap (Harrelson) with only
a faint resemblance to the guy in WHITE MEN CAN’T JUMP, NATURAL BORN
KILLERS and TV’s CHEERS.

It was the theme of the festival, or soon became it. Celebrities,
media folk and role models are only human beings: as good, as bad and even as
ordinary, for much of the day, as the rest of us. It was a message purveyed
by the three best films at Berlin: A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION, directed by
Altman from a Garrison Keillor screenplay; CAPOTE,
a searching, literate showcase for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Oscar-nominated
turn as the IN COLD BLOOD author; and Claude Chabrol’s
L’IVRESSE DU POUVOIR (INTOXICATION OF POWER), demonstrating that our betters
and our moral exemplars – here a Paris investigating magistrate played by
Isabelle Huppert – also have deeper pits to fall into when they take a mis-step.

Altman’s film is princely. Critics who had prepared their quills to
dismiss it as a divertimento had to think again. A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION is
about the dying of an age, reified in the funny, touching farewell broadcast
of a Minnesota local radio show, not removed by 100 miles from Garrison Keillor’s own. With everyone’s nerves stretched on the
rack of finality, no wonder Keillor and singer and
ex-flame MerylStreep
exchange some tart innuendoes around the mike, Harrelson and fellow Texas
crooner John C Reilly put extra edge into their blue-joke patter, and Kevin
Kline – as a Chandlerish private eye hired as
resident security expert – recognizes the strange lady with the blonde hair
and white trenchcoat (Virginia Madsen) for what she
is, an angel of death.

With that last element it could have become Radio MCTS: Metaphysical
Codswallop and Then Some. But Altman has not been around for 40 filmmaking
years without realising the value, and developing the skills, of a light
touch. His camera floats bodilessly around the
crowded set. It eavesdrops on the spoken sentences and unspoken heartbreaks
of these radio troupers giving their all as they give their last.

Death claims an old country singer (LQ Jones) but does not burden his
demise with spurious dignity: the corpse takes its leave with a salvo of
flatulence, heard from outside the door of its ‘lying-in’ by old friends
determined not to giggle. And when death returns to escort Tommy Lee Jones to
his demise as the ‘axeman’ – the big business
hit-person sent to pull the show’s plug – it is just as fleet and flippant.
Altman is old enough to know that Death may be imperious, Death may be
unchallengeable. But that is no reason to let him be a party pooper. There
are enough wit, wisdom and mellow sublimity in A PRAIRIE
HOME COMPANION to lay on it the best epithet of all, Renoirian.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is the main reason to see CAPOTE, though not
the only one. That mincing whine camp with preciosity
– that southern-twanged treble delivered through pursed adenoids and queenly
lips – is caught so accurately that you want to search Hoffman for a
recording/transmitting device. Maybe it is Truman Capote’s voice,
brought to us through the miracle of invisible technology? But Bennett
Miller’s direction and Dan Futterman’s script make
this more than an impersonator’s one-man show. The whole grisly arc – from
the IN COLD BLOOD-inspiring murders to Capote’s shameless emotional
manipulation of killer Perry Smith for his nonfiction-novelistic
ends – is hypnotic. And when you come out of the hypnosis you are still
twitching. Hoffman himself has overleaped mimicry long before the end. He
taps the horror – including horror at himself and his appetite for the pruriently infernal – that lay inside a murder story that
began as a simple magazine commission.

Isabelle Huppert in L’IVRESSE DU POUVOIR begins as a simple juged’instruction: one
ofthose magistrates they have in France to do pre-trial investigative
work with crime suspects. But Huppert being Huppert, and Chabrol
being Chabrol, there is no such thing as a simple juge. Before you can say ‘haute couture’
the actress is walking round in knock-em-dead
outfits. The sky-blue trenchcoats, the umpteen
pairs of red gloves (somewhere between blood and burgundy). It is soon
apparent that this character is indeed ivredupouvoir, drunk
with power, just like the top-banana businessmen she is investigating in a
corruption scandal modelled on France’s ‘Elf Affair’ of some years ago.

Huppert makes such a meal of this role’s vixenish
bounty – which includes a husband henpecked by disdain and garrulous silence
and a craven boss whom she instructs “to go out and buy a pair of balls” –
that you could argue her seven films for Chabrol
now constitute a canon. A film fleuve about
designing women whose chief design is ascendancy over, or annihilation of,
men(VIOLETTE NOZIERE, MADAME BOVARY,
LA CEREMONIE……). Chabrol, directing, tucks into his
own meal, a spare but gourmet repast of subtly restrained colours, rationed
camera movement, and strong music used when – and only when – the
melodramatic knell tolls for those who can no longer delay the law’s judgment
on their crimes or the cinema’s judgment on their lives.

Back out in Berlin the meal I tucked into myself, to stay alive for my
judgments on life, art and film, was a currywurst.
There I stood at a food kiosk on a Ku’damm
sidewalk wolfing the Teutonic equivalent of a large, piping hot dog, washed
down by a Kronenburg.

Meanwhile I watched time and history pull Germany towards a future
that is already looking a bit new-millennnial, is
already suggesting a nation that may someday be enfranchised from guilt,
remorse and moral debt. I noticed that some of the city’s multicoloured bears
this year – those wacky street sculptures that have been a feature for a
decade – are raising their right paws in “siegheil!” salutes. I tell myself this is a joke, not a new
manifestation of neo-Nazism: that in the age of THE PRODUCERS (the film of
the musical of the film) even Germany can start laughing just a bit at the
worst demon in its history (But is it wise?). And the idea of a Berlin Film
Festival where people can actually have a giggle may be the most
revolutionary turnabout in European cultural history. Auf Wiedersehen!

COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS.

WITH THANKS TO THE
AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA.